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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

> If not, they will have blunders and they will lose Europe since people are willing to look for alternatives as USA gets increasingly unpopular among the Europeans due to politics.

But what alternative? There is no European smartphone OS. Windows and Steam OS and XBox are US-american, too.

I suppose Linux, Playstation, and Nintendo, then?

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The alternatives are Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Already the dominant brands in Europe. It doesn't have to be European, it has to be good and those are pretty good at much cheaper prices. They also offer premium models that Apple doesn't have a match.

People pay a lot extra for the feelings the brand invokes in them. Tesla was like that when it was about the values it used to represent, right after Musk dropped those values they had to start pricing their vehicles based on the specs to compete with similarly specced alternatives.

If Apple goes into fight with EU and becomes the "anti-european tech giant" they will have to start selling 300 euro iPhones.

American brands should tread carefully: while America is willing to ban their (cheaper, sometimes better) competitors, Europe is much less willing to — especially now as America itself has taken a much more bullying tone towards its allies.

America overestimates its economic strength on the world stage because they have an unmatched military, but when all books are closed its only 300M people and most of em are broke. That's a market the same size as Brazil, Australia and the UK combined - it's a lot but it's not enough to start unilaterally declaring yourself the boss. USA is playing a losing strategy here.

Most are not broke. The median household income is $79k; compare, say, to the UK where the median household income is $46k.

However, it's true that 300M isn't enough to call yourself boss...

Android is Linux based, although you'd have to build a shitton of replacements for all the stuff Google took out of AOSP and locked behind GMS. And you'd probably have problems getting anyone to manufacture EUDroid devices given that they'd lose access to Google Play if they did.

Alternatively, you could liquidate Apple.

That is: confiscate Apple's EU subsidiaries, repeal DMCA 1201 equivalents in EU law, strip iOS of copyright protection, crack the DRM, replace iCloud's deep integration into iOS, set up a task force for cloning Apple's hardware, and put everything you steal online so other countries can steal iOS too.

Do the same to Microsoft as well. Actually, that would be easier than stealing iOS but I don't think the EU wants to try to revive Windows Mobile as an escalation to a trade war.

The core idea to keep in mind is that trade wars are stupid, but also that America's business tyrants will crumble easily if one were to happen. Globalized trade and supply chains mean that basically nobody is self-sufficient in everything; but in America's case, we're mainly self-sufficient in agriculture. Our comparative advantages in tech and cultural exports are a function of us convincing every other country to actually pay us whatever we want for our culture; which is a deal that countries can trivially reneg on.

Wouldn't be sad about a Linux smartphone.

My dream is to run NixOS in all my devices…

With all apps being sandboxed, though, please!

Here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5

(My daily driver)

There is android. Works pretty well in China without any google services.

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